Kunle was raised in a house where the rules were clear and neatly folded like ‘bottom-box’ Sunday church clothes. His father woke up at 5am and rang the bell for morning prayers every day. It was a compulsory morning service that everybody must attend, groggy or half awake. Daddy ironed his own trousers, polished his shoes in silence, and left for work while Mummy supervised morning chores and breakfast like a field marshal.
Kunle’s mother was a good woman by the standards of her generation. She cooked, cleaned, raised four children and called her husband “Daddy” even when she was angry with him. She washed clothes with her hands, not the washing machine.
Kunle grew up watching a familiar script: Men lead. Women support. Men provide. Women made babies. The lines of duties were finely marked. Women didn’t want to behave like men. When a woman was praised and called ‘obinrin bi okunrin’, that is a woman strong like a man, she smiled, accepted the praise but like a good woman, returned to her place in the society.
Life was simple.
Then Kunle met Zara.
Zara had started her fashion and beauty accessories business at 18. While other girls were learning contouring and concealing tricks on Instagram, Zara was learning how to negotiate with wholesalers in Balogun Market, Lagos.
By the time she was 25, she had three stores, a thriving online business, and workers who called her Madam Zara. Yes.
By the time she married Kunle, Zara had climbed halfway up a ladder and she had no intention of slowing down for marriage. Kunle thought he knew everything about ‘today’s woman’ that he married but the expectations he came into marriage with were traditional, solidly so.
He wanted dinner at seven, freshly made, not microwave-warmed.
She sometimes didn’t get home at 9. She made her soups, neatly packed and tagged fried rice, yam porridge, beans, etc in the freezer.
Kunle expected his wife to slow down once the baby arrived.
Zara expanded the business instead.
He expected to be the “head of the house.”
Zara expected to be a partner.
Kunle wasn’t a bad man. He was not violent, lazy, or irresponsible.
He was simply raised for a world that no longer exists, our parents’ season.
Zara, on the other hand, was built for the world we are already living in, one where women are allowed to have as much as they want.
Gradually, their marriage became a long but tense negotiation table. Who drops the baby at daycare? Who attends the PTA meeting? Why must a man cook?
Why must a man eat pounded yam done with food processor?
Why can’t Kunle get freshly made soup?
Why must a woman always be in the kitchen?
What is wrong with a man operating the washing machine and microwave?
Kunle wasn’t wicked and Zara wasn’t rebellious.
They were simply products of two different trainings. The tension and collision that followed were inevitable.
Then, there was Bose, the Female Boss.
In an office somewhere in Lagos, the managing director is a 38-year-old woman named Bose.
She studied civil engineering, got an MBA, and swiftly climbed the corporate ladder with the determination of someone who refuses to apologise for being excellent. Or being a female boss. When she was a site supervisor, she worked as hard and long as her male colleagues.
As MD, she leads a management team of twelve men, most of them older and raised in homes where their mothers asked permission to buy pepper.
Every Monday morning when Bose walks into the conference room, there is a silent discomfort floating in the air like invisible perfume.
Some of the men call her “our daughter.”
